Experts: Health care reform alone won’t make us healthier

Sacramento, Calif.  Ask around for the healthiest country in the world, and the United States won’t come close to topping the list.

People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.

As debate swirls in Washington and at town halls nationwide over health care reform, there is also a more fundamental question — what about health?

Could policymakers change our medical system in ways that would make America a healthier country?

Insuring everyone should help — but less than people might think, according to doctors and public health experts who have studied the issue. Putting more resources into primary care should also make a dent, they say.

Neither one, though, is likely to send America to the top ranks of its global peers.

“If you want to see dramatic changes in health, you’re not going to get there even by doubling the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system,” said Dr. Richard Kravitz, a University of California, Davis, professor of medicine whose research interests include quality of care.

“When you need it, you really need it ... but in general, the benefits of medical care to populations are a little bit overrated,” he said.

When taken all together, the other factors that play a bigger role include education, income, toxins in the environment, crime, violence, family structure, stress, obesity, nutritious food and exercise.

Across large populations, he said, numerous studies suggest that medical care contributes only modestly to overall health, perhaps somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent.

Health care for all would provide a “very large” improvement for some deprived populations, Kravitz said, but “a surtax on high fructose corn syrup would probably be more effective ... than anything we could do for the health care system, just because of obesity.”

Researchers who have delved into the effects of medical care on the health of large groups overall have made some surprising and sometimes conflicting discoveries.

An experiment in the 1980s that extended different levels of insurance to otherwise uninsured people found that more coverage fostered more use of the medical system but not necessarily healthier people, said Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

A 2006 study that compared white people in England with whites in the United States, in an effort to keep different ethnicities from complicating the findings, reached conclusions Muennig found startling. Even the richest white Americans, who are pretty much universally insured, had more diabetes, more high blood pressure, more heart disease and more cancer than the richest white Britons. On most measures they were a little less healthy than middle income Britons.

This points to a vast range of things health care cannot do, from providing mass transit that makes it likelier people will walk more, to providing the kind of education that correlates strongly with better health.

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Comments

High fructose corn syrup, sugar, and several fruit juices are all nutritionally the same.

High fructose corn syrup is simply a kind of corn sugar. It has the same number of calories as sugar and is handled similarly by the body.

The American Medical Association in June 2008 helped put to rest misunderstandings about this sweetener and obesity, stating that “high fructose syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners.”

According to the American Dietetic Association, “high fructose corn syrup…is nutritionally equivalent to sucrose. Once absorbed into the blood stream, the two sweeteners are indistinguishable.”